Why I Find TV News Largely Unwatchable

Hanson Hosein

Boring, formulaic, and poor story structure.

2 comments

  1. That is a great clip. Thanks for sharing it.

    I wonder if today’s commercial TV news is more commonly used by viewers as background noise rather than a news source. Or, is it required because strict news is simply too boring to hold an audience’s attention? I wonder how many news stories actually resonate with the audience, rather than go into the wind tunnel of communication that we are forced to sift through these days. Is TV news just like e-mail #601 sitting in my Gmail in-box? I saw it go by and I think I know what it said, but I don’t really remember it. And, I probably didn’t do anything with the information.

  2. Television news isn’t the only medium that has become stale and out of touch. Most traditional media formats (and many non-traditional media formats, for that matter) have allowed patterns developed for efficiency and ease of understanding become huge obstacles to engagement. Part of it, I think, is just because of an institutional resistance to change: “This is how we do it,” seems a good enough reason to many people. But I think this out-of-touch format also stems from an addiction to one-way lines of communication. The messages seems to be: “I’m going to tell you how this happened and why you should care.” No matter how many times a news anchor tells views to log onto the station’s Web site and upload pictures of weather or their cutest pets, we can’t seem to shake the bond with an “us-to-you” approach to talking about news.

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